r16, keep in mind that things are RARELY "invented" by one person. More often than not, the people officially credited with having 'invented' something are REALLY just the CEO of the company that successfully COMMERCIALIZED it.
Case in point: AT&T's propaganda to the contrary, Alexander Graham Bell did not invent the first device capable of transmitting sound over wires. People had been doing it the same way people today build Arduino projects for YEARS prior to that point. What Bell actually invented was telephone SERVICE, including the army of employees responsible for negotiating things like right of way acquisitions, establishing reliable supply chains for the components, and making it commercially viable as a service for normal people to use (vs geeks in their basement/barn/whatever).
Ditto, for electric lights. GE propaganda notwithstanding, Thomas Edison absolutely, positively, did not "invent the electric light". He was merely the CEO of a company that paid an army of people who eventually found a profitable way to manufacture useful incandescent light bulbs and, like Bell, had a small army of employees whose job was to negotiate right-of-way leases/easements for things like power lines. The truth is, electric lights were "invented" in one way or another by several dozen people, the overwhelming majority of whom were European and mostly lived in Britain, northern Europe, and Russia. The literal first functioning semi-commercially-viable electric lights were actually invented by (I think) a French or Belgian guy, and consisted of consumable carbon rods that burned brightly enough when electricity was applied to illuminate an entire city block (google: 'moonlight tower').
I'm not 100% sure, but I think LED lights were accidentally discovered by an Indian (dot, not feather) dude who noticed that when you applied DC to what we now regard as primitive semiconductors, they glowed dim red. He mentioned it to a few other people, and they all decided it was cool-but-useless. Someone at Bell Labs independently stumbled over the same phenomenon around the same time, and came to more or less the same conclusion. Twenty years later, after semiconductors were "invented" (really, rediscovered and commercialized by Bell Labs), someone found a way to make them brighter, and they became useful as indicator lights.
Neat side note: most electronic devices actually work to some degree in BOTH directions. Apply power to a motor, it spins. Turn a motor, and it generates power. Apply power to a semiconductor, it glows. Shine light on a semiconductor, it outputs weak power. Drive a paper cone with a magnet, it's a speaker. Shout into a speaker, and it's a microphone that generates small amounts of power that varies according to your voice. Pretty much everything that's ever been "invented" in the electronics realm consisted of someone commercializing some effect in one direction, then someone finding a way to commercialize it working in the other direction.
The point is, almost any 'invention' can ultimately be credited to someone who's white... OR black... OR Asian... or female... or whatever... because somewhere along the line between 'raw concept' and 'commercial product', dozens, hundreds, or even THOUSANDS of people were involved at some point.
